The Rights and Responsibilities of Conscience
Sunday,
September 26, 2004
As we gather in this religious
community, we kindle the flame of our faith:
an invitation to be warmed,
to be enlightened, and
to deepen the search for truth and
meaning
within and without.
Blessed Be!
READING
from Francis David, a pioneer of 16th century Unitarianism
In this
world there have always been many opinions about faith and salvation.
You need
not think alike to love alike.
There must
be knowledge in faith also.
Sanctified
reason is the lantern of faith.
Religious
reform can never be all at once,
but
gradually, step by step.
If they offer something better, I will gladly learn.
The most
important spiritual function is conscience, the source of all spiritual joy and
happiness.
Conscience
will not be quieted by anything less than truth and justice.
SERMON
In the 16th century, when Francis David, or David Ferenc, as
he was called in his own tongue, led his followers in Transylvania from Roman
Catholicism to Methodism and on to Unitarianism, he was following his
conscience: his inner knowing about what is right and what is necessary for the
search for truth and justice. As he notes, “If they offer something better, I will
gladly learn.” Notice, however, that he
actively shared what he learned with the community he served.
Our Unitarian Universalist fourth Principle affirms
“. . . the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process
within our congregations and in society at large.” How appropriate to our
times! So much for the accusation that we are “God’s frozen people.” We care
passionately about conscience, and, therefore, cannot be accused of being
frozen. Perhaps, many are cold, but few are frozen?
What is conscience really and how do we follow its
directives ? We wrestle with these questions throughout our lives, and the
answers must and will change with our experience and our awareness. So let’s
wrestle a bit now, looking at the root meaning of the word conscience, exploring
the rights inherent to conscience, and the responsibilities we must not shirk
if we respond truly to our consciences.
The word conscience derives from the Latin conscientia,
meaning “consciousness, knowledge, feeling, sense, moral sense.” It
therefore follows that its primary meaning is
“a knowledge or feeling of right and wrong, with a compulsion to do
right; moral judgment that prohibits or opposes the violation of a previously
recognized ethical principle.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American
Language, college edition, 1968) Conscience is closely related to the word conscious. Consciousness implies awareness of
connections deep within and also outside ourselves that lead to greater
awareness of all of life.
Notice that Webster’s perspective on these words does not
separate thought and feeling but puts them together to create a true sense of
right and wrong. This resonates with Daniel Goleman’s assertion that we are not
thinking beings that feel, but, through the natural evolutionary development of
our brains, we are feeling beings that think. While we have certainly developed
the frontal cortexes of our brains, it is still all too possible for our limbic
or primitive brain to high-jack our responses in many ways. The joining of the
Unitarian mind with the Universalist heart to access one’s Source as collective
conscious could be described as conscience.
As freely associated Unitarian Universalists, we assert that
we can and must make conscious choices, using both our thoughts and our
feelings working in concert to provide the best possible awareness of the
situation in which we find ourselves. This is human being at its best. This is
conscience in action. It means we are self-aware and other aware in equal
measure, and that this compelling awareness includes a moral sense.
If this is conscience, what rights might inhere to it in
healthy society. Clearly, one should, in one’s community and society, have the
right to speak one’s truth to power, to exercise one’s gifts freely for one’s
self and one’s community, and to pursue one’s dreams providing they do not
exploit or inhibit the dreams of others – life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. These are basic rights that we take for granted only if we feel we
have access to them.
But remember that there are many people in this country who,
simply by virtue of being different in some way, do not yet have these rights.
Consider the more than 350 treaties made – and broken – in relation to our
Native Americans. Their rights held little moral power when and where governmental desire for land and
minerals came into play. Consider the fact that persons of color do not have
the same access to high quality legal services, so that the greater percentage
of them are in our prison/industrial complex where their slave labor fuels our
corporations. Right to a fair trial seems to fall below the right of the
corporation to cheap labor. The right of gays and lesbians to marry and be
treated equally by the government is denied with impunity. And, in this town,
the right to a living wage falls prey to the large numbers of trailing spouses
and students who can – and often must – work for minimum wage. If you aren’t a
professor or an engineer, you can expect low job security and lower wages, not
rights to dignity and worth.
Of course, in a republic, the right to vote is an obvious
right, for it allows us to use our individuals consciences to co-create a
collective conscience that works “for the greater good of all.” This ideal
assumes that together we may find
better solutions than we could alone. It asserts the place of the community in
the life of the individual – and vice versa.
But the current situation in this country is that half of us
are not exercising this right, whether for the greater good of all or not. As
Michael Moore notes accurately, half of U.S. voters are solidly
Republican, half are Democrats, and half of the country doesn’t vote at all.
This is astonishing! -and sad. I
would rather be totally over-ruled by
voters with opposing perspectives, if the vote truly showed what the citizens
of this country wanted. When barely half of our citizens vote, by default, we
really don’t know what our citizens want or believe. It is small wonder
that we let our civil rights be taken away so easily these days, in ways great
and small, if we won’t even exercise our franchise.
Of course, this leads me to the responsibilities of
conscience. This is a spiritual concern which takes into account that each and
every conscience – and consciousness – is needed to co-create the greater
consciousness and conscience. We are all in this together and together we
co-create that which is larger than ourselves, whether we choose to participate
o not. So, if we demand a right, we must also expect to exercise that right
responsibly.
I have often said, “If you don’t vote, don’t whine.” Or, as
a button I picked up recently puts it, “Vote or Shut Up!”
But is voting or registering people to vote enough? More than ever, we need to stand up, speak
up, and recognize that participation will probably take us out of our comfort
zone into the culture wars of this new century. Silence equals death: death of freedom, death of
truth, death of our rights. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” And
each of us who does not make some effort to bring our principles to life will
see them disappear.
This does not mean we have to do it alone. This is the
genius of the reciprocity of rights and responsibilities: we recognize that we
are not alone, that there is a “cloud of witnesses” and of co-workers engaged
in the process. We know that we stand
on the shoulders of giants: giants like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Olympia Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Adlai
Stevenson, Eliot Richardson, and so many lesser known but hard working
Unitarian Universalists of conscience.
When we work together, we can trust the process, for we know
that we have a consciousness greater than our own filling us with the energy of
shared effort. Ralph Herverson offers an inspiring picture of people of
conscience as religious people in his poem “Impassioned Clay”:
Deep in
ourselves resides the religious impulse.
Out of the
passions of our clay it rises.
We have
religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient,
self-sustaining, or self-derived.
We have
religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond
our failures.
We have
religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up at beauty, when our nerves
are edged by some dream in the heart.
We have
religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all that we have received.
We have
religion when we look upon people with all their failings and still find in
them good; when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the
purpose in our own heart.
We have
religion when we have done all that we can, and then in confidence entrust
ourselves to the life hat is larger than ourselves.
So may it be! So may we be known truly, not as “sunshine
liberals”, but as people with deep
religion, with respect, with responsibility, and with relish for the
process!
Blessed Be!